Steel will in a steel mill
A visit to Nowa Huta
I’ve always had a soft spot for the hard lines of communist-era architecture. To me, there’s something weirdly comforting about chunky, rectilinear concrete buildings. Perhaps it’s because they remind me of sheer cliff faces.
I’ve no idea what they do for the Oldies, but I was quite happy to join them on a trip to Nowa Huta, an industrial satellite town meaning ‘new steel mill’ which was built from scratch in the 1950s not far from Krakow. Built as a Socialist Realist city, Nowa Huta was intended to be a shining example of a ‘proletariat paradise’.
The powers behind the construction of Nowa Huta didn’t seem to give a hoot that the land it was built on was extremely fertile and better suited for farming than industrial use. In fact, local farmers were ousted to make room for the project. There was no demand for steel in this part of the country either. There is no local coal. Not even any local iron ore. Which I find rather ironic.
So it looks to me that Nowa Huta was basically a giant PR exercise. And it really is gigantic. The steel works just go on and on and on… I wasn’t surprised to learn that it employed up to 40,000 workers in its heyday. The town itself is on a grand scale too. I was most impressed with its imposing blocks of buildings arranged in geometric patterns around wide boulevards and large public areas. Pity they don’t have an observation balloon like the one in Krakow. Nowa Huta must look amazing from above!
For such a large place, I was surprised by how little traffic there was. His Lordship took advantage of this, often stopping to take photos while standing in the middle of the road – or even in the middle of a tram track. At one point, Her Ladyship squealed on seeing an approaching tram, ‘Watch out! Look, it’s a learner driver. I don’t want to be his first kill!’
Before you start feeling too concerned about her, I can assure you that she probably would have had to stand around for a very long time before even having a chance of getting hit. In fact, a lot of the traffic around here seems to be the two-legged variety. It’s no wonder either, what with all those beautiful parks and tree-lined avenues. How nice of the planners to design such a leafy urban area!
Or so I thought, until I discovered that all that greenery was incorporated in the design to help absorb any possible nuclear explosion. Lovely! Going green obviously had a completely different meaning back in the days of the Cold War.
I also got a shiver through my feathers when I learned that there is a huge network of tunnels and underground bunkers in Nowa Huta designed for citizens to take shelter in during a nuclear attack. Although I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea, the Oldies insisted on visiting one such shelter. I needn’t have worried. It was certainly a far cry from Hoxha’s bunkers in Albania. Simply part of a basement of a school, it’s not even underground. It has windows, for goodness sake! Now that would be useful when a nuclear bomb was dropped. You could watch it dropping on you!
I’m sure that most people who moved to Nowa Huta must have been happy to be allocated a modern apartment and have plenty of job opportunities. But the rebel in me was glad to discover that the local residents didn’t go along with everything that was imposed on them. They fought for years to be allowed to build a church in the town, with eventual success. The Solidarność/Solidarity movement was very strong here. Several attempts were made to blow up the huge Lenin statue in Central Square. And after the fall of communism, the square itself was renamed Ronald Reagan Square. In fact, I noticed quite a few roads with names that are definitely not the original communist-era ones!
It appears that all that concrete and steel could not bend the iron will of the people.
